If I understand correctly what Pat Hayes is saying about time and the now of experience then it appears as if time has - at least in our experiential sense of it - developed an arbitrary incremental beginning and end which allows us to experience a discrete slice of it.
I think that the intuitive - and incorrect - analogy here which by the way is rather attractive is that of retentivity as applied to oscilliscopes. Retentivity or persistence is a measure of the time an area of the screen remains luminescent after the electron beam has moved on. With high retentivity the image of the waveform remains on the screen for a long time and can be easily observed and analyzed. On the other hand, with little or no retentivity all we see is a bouncing dot which is virtually useless in term of information transfer.
The analogy here seems to be that our time slice of experience is analogus to the retentivity of the screen but this is not the case. If we had something other than an instantaneous time slice then we would not need to have any retentivity inherent in the screen because our phenomenal visual system would supply the constructed image via its own retentivity mechanism.
There is a phenomenal illusion here of visual retentivity here because the image of the oscilliscope itself appears to remain fixed in our awareness but this is because its image is continually rewritten upon the visual system with perfect registration by virtue of the fact that it is simply fixed in space. With moving objects - which are of counse in a time dependent relationship with their enviornment - we are able to develop coherent images not by adjusting the time slice but simply by tracking the object which makes it fixed relative to the visual system and therefore rewritable with perfect registration. In other words, all of our phenomenal experience is continually rewritten using what is virtually an instantaneous time slice.
This is not to say that there aren't other temporal and sequential mechanisms which allow us to mentally appreciate past and future events by evoking memories and making temporal propositions.
--
Michael Baggot
P.O. Box 53167 San Jose, CA 95123
E-mail baggot@cruzio.com
jcs-online
menu